In spite of the unique histories of slavery and persons of African descent in each of the six countries discussed in this book, certain themes recur. In a sense, this book is a study of the growth and demise of the sugar economy in many of these countries, along with that of coffee and tobacco. In most of these societies, a great deal of miscegenation and genetic admixture occurred between masters and their slaves, very early on in the history of slavery there. Several of these countries sponsored official immigration policies of "whitening," aiming to dilute the numbers of its citizens who were black or darker shades of brown by encouraging Europeans to migrate there.

And speaking of skin color, each of these countries had (and continues to have) many categories of color and skin tone, ranging from as few as 12 in the Dominican Republic and 16 in Mexico to 134 in Brazil, making our use of octoroon and quadroon and mulatto pale by comparison. Latin American color categories can seem to an American as if they are on steroids. I realized as I encountered people who still employ these categories in everyday discussions about race in their society that it is extremely difficult for those of us in the United States to see the use of these categories as what they are, the social deconstruction of the binary opposition between "black" and "white," outside of the filter of the "one-drop rule," which we Americans have inherited from racist laws designed to retain the offspring of a white man and a black female slave as property of the slave's owner. Far too many of us as African Americans see the use of these terms as an attempt to "pass" for anything other than "black," rather than as historically and socially specific terms that people of color have invented and continue to employ to describe a complex reality larger than the terms black, white, and mulatto allow for.

After extended periods of "whitening," many of these same societies then began periods of "browning," as I think of them, celebrating and embracing their transcultural or multicultural roots, declaring themselves unique precisely because of the extent of racial admixture among their citizens. (The abolition of "race" as an official category in the federal censuses of some of the countries I visited has made it extremely difficult for black minorities to demand their rights, as in Mexico and Peru.) The work of José Vasconcelos in Mexico, Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, Gilberto Freyre in Brazil, and Fernando Ortiz in Cuba compose a sort of multicultural quartet, though each approached the subject from different, if related, vantage points. The theories of "browning" espoused by Vasconcelos, Freyre, and Ortiz, however, could be double-edged swords, both valorizing the black roots of their societies yet sometimes implicitly seeming to denigrate the status of black cultural artifacts and practices outside of an ideology of mestizaje, or hybridity.

[Jennifer] Cramblett in effect sued [in Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank] for âwrongful racismâ; she did not receive the whiteness bargained for and so sued under terms suggesting she is due compensation for the factânot that there is racismâbut that she now has to deal with it personally. One might question, for example, why the couple supposedly didnât feel any qualms about raising a white child in a town that is âtoo racially intolerant.â âWrongful birthâsâ transition into the realm of race significantly marks a recognition of the social, political, and environmental issues sustaining racism and its associated harms, but the problem here is the site of redressâthe white mothersârather than the environment lending credence to their case in the first place. Cramblett describes a personal loss that relies on structural analyses to articulate, all the while refusing to vilify those structures as problems in themselves.

Comments Off on Cramblett in effect sued for âwrongful RACISMâ; she did not receive the whiteness bargained for and so sued under terms suggesting she is due compensation for the factânot that there IS racismâbut that she now has to deal with it personally.

In October of 2014, news outlets began reporting on a case of a lesbian couple suing a sperm bank for receiving the wrong donorâs sperm. As the lawsuit Cramblett v. Midwest Sperm Bank alleged, not only did the couple receive the wrong donorâs sperm, but they had specifically chosen a white donor with blonde hair and blue eyes and the sperm they received had been from a black donor. Both women were white. The couple gave birth to a black/mixed-race child in 2012 and claimed that their daughterâs race posed particular challenges for their family, from facing prejudice in their nearly all-white community to difficulties dealing with their daughterâs hair. The couple sued for âwrongful birthâ and âbreach of warranty,â citing emotional and economic difficulties.

Clearly, there are legal issues at stakeâthe particular sperm bank was negligent in their handling of the transaction. But the claim of âwrongful birthâ brings up myriad sociopolitical and ethical concerns as well. Effectively, the plaintiff was alleging that her daughterâs blackness generated emotional suffering and economic burdens for Cramblett, and moreover, that she should be compensated for âdamagesâ.

Unsurprisingly, many commentators reacted with outrage, disbelief, and dismayâoutrage that a mother would sue on account of having a non-white, but healthy child, disbelief that this claim could even be legally articulable, and dismay at the fact that one day this child would learn that her mother implicitly claimed that she should have never been born because she was black/mixed race.

While obviously problematic (the case was thrown out by an Illinois Circuit Court Judge in 2015), the fact that this case was legally and thus on some level, socially and culturally intelligible, sets the stage for an array of philosophical interventions. For my purposes here, Iâll focus primarily on the problems and possibilities of various conceptualizations of race and disability that are illuminated by a politically-aware and historically-situated reading of Cramblett…